Chinese Chicken Salad appears as a signature dish in 1 United States cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.
Chinese chicken salad · San Francisco
Chinese chicken salad is a California Chinese American plate of shredded chicken, romaine, fried wonton skins and a sesame-soy dressing, popularised through San Francisco.
The salad's modern shape came together at Trader Vic's, Madame Wu's in Santa Monica and Cecilia Chiang's The Mandarin in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square through the 1960s and 1970s. Chiang opened The Mandarin in 1968 and introduced San Franciscans to the regional cooking beyond Cantonese (Sichuan, Shanghai, Hunan); the salad as a composed plate of cool chicken with crisp aromatics was on her menu. It moved into chain kitchens (Wolfgang Puck's at LAX, P.F. Chang's nationally) by the 1990s, then back to the chef-driven rooms (Mister Jiu's serves a refined take). The dish is now closer to the city's Cal-Chinese vocabulary than to any single mainland origin.
Where to eat in San Francisco:
- Mister Jiu's
- Z & Y Bistro